“Next man up” only works if there’s a next man to do the job
Things are good for the Kansas City Royals, primarily for one big reason: The Royals are extremely likely to make it to the playoffs for the first time since their 2015 championship season. With so few games left to play and a sizable lead on the team’s main competitors for the third Wild Card slot—to say nothing of the Minnesota Twins and the Cleveland Guardians, with whom the Royals are still competing for the second Wild Card slot and the division lead, respectively—it would take a wacky few weeks for the Royals to fall out of a playoff spot.
Kansas City has struggled a bit to put this season away for good, however. On August 29, first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino broke his thumb in a collision. The Royals had lost the previous game, would go on to lose that one, and then drop another five immediately afterward.
Does it suck losing Vinnie for maybe the rest of the season? Yes. Does it make the team worse? Yes—we’ll get into that more in a second. But the thing about Vinnie is that he is a good but not great player. Yes, he has 97 RBIs and has hit .341/.380/.527 with men on base this year. Without men on base, though, he’s hit .199/.258/.380, and on the year he has a lukewarm 106 wRC+. No one wants to hear this, but it’s true: first basemen and designated hitters like Vinnie, who has hit .257/.318/.443 over his last 814 plate appearances, are not core cogs on a team.
So why, then, does losing Vinnie seem like such a big blow for the Royals? It’s because the problem with losing Vinnie for a few weeks isn’t so much Vinnie himself—it’s that it has exposed Kansas City’s lack of internal depth.
On one hand, Kansas City’s supporting cast this year has been pretty solid. Freddy Fermin has been the best backup catcher possible and probably deserves a starting role somewhere. Hunter Renfroe has hit a solid .286/.359/.468 since mid-May and has been a league-average hitter overall. When healthy, Michael Massey has been really good offensively and defensively. Maikel Garcia and Kyle Isbel have been effective, high-skill defensive role players.
But on the other hand, nobody there can be relied on to really step up more than what they’re already doing, and there is nobody in the upper minors that can be relied on to help, either. Nick Pratto has an 89 wRC+ with a nearly 30% strikeout rate at Triple-A this year. Nick Loftin had a 49 wRC+ in the big leagues this year, and Nelson Velazquez had a 75 wRC+. Tyler Gentry, John Rave, Devin Mann, Drew Waters, and Nate Eaton are all at least 25 years old with checkered offensive pasts in the minors and are, at most, utility guys without a noteworthy skill. And in Double-A, the Royals’ best hitters are still a year away at least.
JJ Picollo and the Royals front office have known about the lack of position player depth all year, and they’ve responded as well as they could have. Before the season, they signed Adam Frazier and Garrett Hampson. At the deadline, they acquired Paul DeJong. Then, right after Vinnie’s injury, they went out and signed Tommy Pham and Robbie Grossman from the waiver wire and grabbed Yuri Gurriel in a minor league trade.
Results have been varied. Frazier has been really bad, Hampson has been good defensively at a variety of positions, and DeJong has been lightning in a bottle; there hasn’t been much time to gauge the others. But the point is that the Royals have had to keep rolling their d20s because they haven’t been able to produce as many Michael Masseys and Vinnie Pasquantinos as the good teams can. I don’t need to re-litigate the Royals’ crappy drafting as of late, so I won’t, but you know the names just like I do that haven’t even became top prospects let alone MLB contributors.
For the short term, if the Royals can make it work with Pham, Grossman, et al, then that’s great. But to compete for the division with teams that can produce (or sign!) multiple Pasquantino-level contributors, the Royals will need to do the same.
